Norman Mailer

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Image:Normanmailer.jpg Norman Kingsley Mailer (born January 31, 1923) is an American writer and, along with Truman Capote, is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction.

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Biography

Norman Mailer was born to a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. He was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, and began attending Harvard University in 1939, where he studied aeronautical engineering. At the university, he became interested in writing and published his first story when he was 18.

Mailer was drafted into the Army in World War II and served in the South Pacific. In 1948, just before enrolling in the Sorbonne in Paris, he wrote a book that made him world-famous: The Naked and the Dead, based on his personal experiences during World War II. It was hailed by many as one of the best American novels to come out of the war years and named one of the "100 best novels" by the Modern Library.

In the following years, Mailer worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Much of his work was refused by many publishers. But in the mid-1950s, he became famous as an anti-establishment essayist, and he was one of the founders of The Village Voice in 1955 [1]. In pieces such as The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1956) and Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer examined violence, hysteria, crime, and confusion in American society.

Other famous works include: The Deer Park (1955), An American Dream (1965), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), Armies of the Night (1968, awarded a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), The Prisoner of Sex (1971), The Executioner's Song (1979, awarded a Pulitzer Prize), Ancient Evenings (1983), Harlot's Ghost (1991) and Oswald's Tale (1995).

A number of Mailer's works, such as Armies of the Night, are of a political nature. He established a reputation for political reportage, covering the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, and 1996. In 1967, he was arrested, briefly, for his involvement in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Two years later, he ran unsuccessfully as an independent for Mayor of New York City, allied with columnist Jimmy Breslin (who ran for City Council President), with the agenda of New York City secession and creating a 51st state.

In 1980, Norman Mailer spearheaded convicted killer Jack Abbott's bid for parole, which was successful. He helped Abbott publish a book titled In the Belly of the Beast, a collection of his letters to Mailer about his experiences in prison. However, the psychopathic Abbott committed a murder not long after his release, and was returned to prison. Mailer was subject to criticism for his role in getting Jack Abbott released and in a 1992 interview in the Buffalo News, Mailer conceded that his involvement with Abbott was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in."

Mailer is also noted as a biographer. His subjects have included Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Harvey Oswald. His biography of Monroe was paticularly controversial; in its final chapter he stated that the star was actually murdered by agents of the FBI and CIA who resented her (supposedly then ongoing) affair with Robert Kennedy. Mailer himself would later admit that he purposely avoided researching the circumstance of Monroe's death in depth, because he wanted to create controversy.

Norman Mailer has been married six times, including - since 1980 - to painter Norris Church, who is twenty-six years his junior. He has nine children by his various wives -- three sons and six daughters. In 1960, Mailer stabbed his second wife Adele Morales with a penknife at a party in their home - a wound that penetrated to the lining of her heart. While she fully recovered, Mailer subsequently found the episode difficult to live down.

Mailer appears in the documentary films When We Were Kings about "the Rumble in the Jungle" Heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and in the documentary Hijacking Catastrophe, a film about 9/11 and the Iraq War. He is mentioned in the songs "Give Peace a Chance" by John Lennon, "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)[2]" by Simon & Garfunkel, "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken" by Lloyd Cole, "Santa Monica" by Savage Garden, and "Get By" by Talib Kweli. The Welsh punk band The Manic Street Preachers mention him alongside Sylvia Plath, Henry Miller, and Harold Pinter in their song "Faster" on their 1994 album The Holy Bible and the Australian art-pop band TISM mention him alongside Dylan Thomas and Jackson Pollack in their song "Genius is different". He is also mentioned in Woody Allen's satirical futuristic film Sleeper (1973) in which Allen says to a scientist, "This is a picture of Norman Mailer. He left his ego to the Harvard Medical School!" In 1999 Mailer was featured in the role of Harry Houdini in the second installment of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle.

In 2005, Mailer had a special guest star appearance, playing himself on the WB television show Gilmore Girls. The episode, titled "Norman Mailer, I'm Pregnant", has the author being interviewed at the Dragonfly Inn, an establishment owned by the main character, Lorelai Gilmore. Also guest starring was Mailer's son, actor Stephen Mailer, who played the interviewer.

Since May 2005, he has been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.

He currently lives in Provincetown, MA.

He has recently co-authored a book with his youngest child, John Buffalo Mailer, titled "The Big Empty".

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